Green Business: April 2008 Archives
than all 4-year colleges combined.
Van Jones helps kids in trouble get out of trouble and into jobs. Helping mothers find alternatives for their kids in prison. Jones got burned out when he confronted all the problems in the community. Facing the culture shock between Oakland and Marin County also brought healing that showed him that green jobs and a green economy could be strong enough to lift people out of poverty and improve community and health at the same time -- these new workers could retrofit the nation!
Jones saw these new workers as the rescuers of their nation -- reallocate the money from prisons to green jobs. Practical, applied, in the real world.
with Van Jones. Watch video.
Green-Collar Jobs in America’s Cities New publication outlines strategies for developing green-collar job initiatives and pathways out of poverty at the local level. Co-authored by Green For All, this report describes a 4-step approach for local initiatives and highlights a dozen great efforts already underway around the country.
Green For All, in partnership with the Apollo Alliance, Center for American Progress, and the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, recently released this guide to help cities across America develop strategies to spur the creation of green-collar jobs and opportunity in their communities.
The new guide, Green-Collar Jobs in America’s Cities: Building Pathways out of Poverty and Careers in the Clean Energy Economy, is a first-of-its-kind publication that addresses the demand for this information and outlines a strategic framework in which local policymakers and advocates can develop a green-collar job initiative that responds to the realities of their local economies and communities.
“Our green future will be invented at the local level,” said Van Jones, founder and president of Green For All. “This report offers those leaders some of the best thinking and models currently available for building green-collar jobs and the training pipelines necessary for city residents to fill those jobs and claim the promise of living wage careers.”
The guide encourages cities to take a four-step approach.
- First, set a baseline to start from. Identify your environmental and economic goals, and assess local and regional opportunities for achieving those goals.
- Second, develop a green economic development plan. Enact policies and programs to drive investment into targeted green economic activity and increase demand for local green-collar workers.
- Third, ready your workforce. Prepare your green-collar workforce by building green-collar job training partnerships to identify and meet workforce training needs, and by creating green pathways out of poverty that focus on recruitment, job readiness, job training, and job placement for low-income residents.
- And fourth, build on your successes. Leverage your program’s success to build political support for new and bolder policies and initiatives.
Green For All
414 13th St, Suite 600
Oakland, CA 94612
510-663-6500
http://www.greenforall.org/
Environmental Justice
through innovative, economically sustainable projects
that are informed by community needs.
VIDEO with Majora Carter, founder
Founded in 2001 by life-long South Bronx resident, Dr. Majora Carter, SSBx also addresses land-use, energy, transportation, water & waste policy, and education to advance the environmental and economic rebirth of the South Bronx, and inspire solutions in areas like it across the nation and around the world.
http://www.aspenenvironment.org/live-from-the-forum
The GrassRoots Recycling Network has a vision of the world where waste is not waste – it is a resource.
GRRN is the leading voice calling for Zero Waste (ZW) in the
United States by promoting the message that we must go “beyond
recycling” and go upstream to the headwaters of the waste stream which
is the industrial designer’s desk.
Zero Waste means not only 100% recovery of society’s discards, but also a redesign of the products and packaging of our lives such that everything produced for our consumer economy is non-toxic and designed to be recovered for re-use, recycling or composting.
GrassRoots Recycling Network is a national network of waste reduction activists and recycling professionals. GRRN sets ambitious standards for Zero Waste goals and policies. They provide opportunities for on-going participation in campaigns and build coalitions to achieve zero waste policies, businesses and communities. They have a valuable website and an active email listserve (called GreenYes) of many hundreds of knowledgeable experts in both downstream recovery and upstream clean production issues.
What is Zero Waste?
GRRN
developed the core message of Zero Waste in the mid-1990’s as the new
vision of the grassroots recycling movement, and has been successful in
using that theme to connect recyclers, innovative corporate leaders,
activists, and others both nationally and globally.
GRRN's Zero Waste
message combines visionary thinking with real-world practice to go beyond recycling,
and in the process have described some simple, important solutions to
many pressing issues, such as
- corporate accountability
- local economic development
- air and water pollution
- resource depletion
CONTACT INFO:
PO Box 282
Cotati, CA 94931
